Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney looks on as his running mate, Paul Ryan, speaks during a campaign rally at the village green park in Powell, Ohio, on Aug. 25, 2012.

I have a healthy suspicion of all forms of government and politicians and therefore advocate for small government and giving politicians as little power as we possibly can. Here is one reason why.

The same politicians who say they want small government — many who claim to be conservatives — also want government to ban abortion in all its forms. Now that this has clearly come to light, Romney is refusing to answer questions about this issue. The Republicans are running scared and have demanded that a Republican Senate candidate, Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, who made outrageous comments about “legitimate rape,” withdraw from his race.

This NASA handout image from Oct. 7, 2011, shows a haze over eastern China. Dust and aerosol pollution from Asia travels across the ocean and sullies the air in the United States and Canada, possibly worsening the effects of climate change, a NASA-backed study showed Aug. 2, 2012.

U.S. Catholic bishops take a lot of heat for entangling themselves in American politics when it comes to abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage. But for those of you who have come to mistake Catholics as members of a monolithic, conservative Republican super PAC, consider the Franciscan Action Network.

The Franciscans, who also seek to transform U.S. public policy, say one of the most serious challenges facing the nation is being ignored by both presidential candidates. They’re calling on President Obama and Mitt Romney to acknowledge that global climate change is “an extremely critical ecological and moral issue.” Obama and Romney should identify the actions they would take to address this “threat to life on earth,” they say.

“The most prestigious scientific bodies in the world agree that climate change is a reality, that it is primarily attributed to human actions, and that the emission of greenhouse gases must be dramatically reduced to avert devastating consequences,” the Franciscan Action Network wrote in a release this week. “Leaders of major faith communities also agree that global warming is a real and serious moral and ethical concern.”

We recently have seen increasing numbers of Christian groups who use religious arguments to influence public policy.

Catholic priests, joined by numbers of protestant ministers, say religious organizations should not have to pay for their employees’ birth control. Other groups use religious arguments in their opposition to abortion, and still others say that marriage same-sex or LGBT people is against God’s law.

The success of these religious arguments is obvious: Employees who work for Catholic organizations must pay for their own birth control; abortion services are being wiped out state by state; and, gay marriage is still not legal.

The fact that religious arguments are at the forefront of our public policy debates means that we citizens have the opportunity to define religion’s role in our government. To do that, we must look at the larger picture — we must look at how religion functions in our society, and we must examine our belief in freedom of religion.

Once we better understand how religion functions, we will begin to view the notion of freedom of religion through the lens of the First Amendment’s establishment clause — and we will see that religiously based laws have no place in our public policy.

In public discourse, religion is characterized as if it were monolithic. Even though there are many different religions, Americans have set expectations about what constitutes religion. Our religious expectations include behavioral standards and adherence to certain statements of belief. In America, we understand that religions have unique holy days and that each religion tends to have its own body of sacred writings. Religion helps a person to know what is expected. Religion helps people to explain their place in the world and in the society around them.

Christianity and Judaism are two religions that have been hugely influential in helping Americans determine their relationship to society and the world. Although very different in practice and belief, both Christianity and Judaism share the same creation story — and in this story God creates the entire universe. Having a God who creates the entire universe sets up some problems. After all, if there is one God who creates everything, shouldn’t that God also be the God of everything and everyone? This conflict — the conflict of the universal against the particular – is now playing out in American society. Americans are currently struggling with how a universal God can allow particular beliefs, especially when the particular beliefs are in conflict with what the universal God has set up as the truth.

The framers of the Constitution addressed the issue of the universal and the particular through the First Amendment. As it relates to the matter of religion and government, the First Amendment reads as follows: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof … .” In the First Amendment there are two clauses relating to religion: One deals with the establishment of a national religion, and one deals with the free exercise of religion.

The establishment clause states that American government will not favor one religion over another. Yet this is exactly what society is struggling with — the establishment of Christianity as our national religion.

The religious left got leftier and the religious right got rightier this week.

Two religion news stories broke this week that have no connection except perhaps this blog and other news-aggregating sites. Yet for anyone who wonders how much more polarized we can become as a nation, here are two indications we can yet broaden the great divide.

The resolution to do so passed the 77th General Convention at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis with the approval of 78 percent of lay members and 76 percent of clergy. It passed, the Indianapolis Star reported, by similar margins the night before in the House of Bishops.

No minister or bishop must use the rite. The liturgy is provisional until it can be re-examined at the next General Convention. The official position of the Episcopal Church remains that marriage is between one man and one woman.

On the right, many Tea Party members are reportedly surprised to learn that, along with being fiscal conservatives and foes of big government, they share a Christian faith best described as conservative evangelical.

I am a member of the Notre Dame Law School Class of 1968. We graduated the Spring of Martin Luther King’s and Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan received an honorary degree from the University that year, and he personally handed all 56 law achool graduates our diplomas. Vatican II reforms were being introduced into the U.S. Catholic Church. Most of us avoided the Vietnam War, devoted many years to being good lawyers, fathered children — some who went to Notre Dame. If Justice Brennan were alive and well today, he would not be permitted to appear on Notre Dame’s campus. Something has gone horribly wrong.

Thousands of Notre Dame benefactors, graduates and students recently received a message from you advising that Notre Dame had filed a federal lawsuit against the United States, specifically naming two Catholic women in President Obama’s cabinet as lead defendants, Secretary of Health and Human Services Katherine Sebelius and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis.

Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, gestures during an interview at the North American College in Rome on Feb. 14, 2012.

Forty-three Roman Catholic institutions — none of them in Colorado — filed 12 lawsuits Monday in federal courts across the country over the Obama administration’s mandate that health insurance plans include coverage for various forms of contraception.

The combined effort by Catholic dioceses, schools, social services and other organizations was long expected even after the Obama administration had conceded that Catholic institutions would not have to pay for coverage or refer their employees for coverage. But church officials and leaders say that it nevertheless requires religious employers to provide contraceptive and sterilization services in violation of their beliefs and the First Amendment.

“We have tried negotiation with the Administration and legislation with the Congress — and we’ll keep at it — but there’s still no fix,” said Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is not party in the lawsuits. “It is also a compelling display of the unity of the Church in defense of religious liberty.”

American has a long history of defending religious freedom. U.S. Catholic bishops’ argue that the Obama administration, specifically its healthcare mandate for coverage of birth control, is a threat to this tradition of religious freedom, even with the Obama compromise of a broadened exemption for religiously affiliated organizations.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops deemed insufficient the Obama-proffered compromise of exempting religious hospitals and universities from picking up the cost of covering their employees’ contraceptive services. Insurance companies would pay, the administration said. Yet the bishops said it didn’t matter who paid for it. They don’t want the employees of Catholic institutions, even the non-Catholics, to have access to free birth control. The Church argues the federal government is forcing it to betray its fundamental beliefs and is denying constitutional freedoms.

Journalist David Gibson, in a Religion News Service blog, and others noticed that one of the best-framed challenges to the bishops was a recent editorial in the Jesuits’ flagship magazine America — a piece that brings clarity to what is really at stake.

“The religious liberty campaign seems to have abandoned a moral distinction that undergirded the (bishops’) public advocacy in past decades: the contrast between authoritative teaching on matters of principle and debatable applications to public policy,” the editorial says.

In other words, the bishops once expected a diversity of views in the public square on how to apply universal moral principles. And, the America editorial argues, contemporary Catholic social teaching once called for tempering arguments over policy differences with charity and civility.

“By pushing the religious liberty campaign to cover the fine points of healthcare coverage,” the March 5 editorial said, “the campaign devalues the coinage of religious liberty. The fight the conference won against the initial mandate was indeed a fight for religious liberty, and for that reason, won widespread support. The latest phase of the campaign, however, is essentially an effort to bar healthcare funding for contraception for everyone. Catholics legitimately oppose such a policy on moral grounds. But that opposition entails a difference over policy, not an infringement of religious liberty. It does a disservice to the victims of religious persecution everywhere to inflate policy differences into a struggle over religious freedom. Such exaggerated protests, likewise, show a disrespect for the freedom Catholics have enjoyed in the United States, which is the model for the world — and the church.”

Catholic political theology holds that “the government has the responsibility to coordinate contending rights and interests for the sake of the common good.” The bishops seems to have forgotten that other Americans, of different denominations and with different beliefs about contraception, also have rights that government must balance.

Where is your moral compass pointing? What are your social values? Hark will explore faith, morals, ethics and character at the intersection of religion ethics, culture, politics, media, science, education, economics and philosophy. At times this blog will alert readers to breaking news and trends. At times it will attempt to look more deeply into intriguing subjects. Hark means to listen attentively, and we will, as readers talk back to the news.